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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Feature [published September 1996] The Godfather: Sex And Spaghetti Bethan Roberts watches the transformation of the American-Italian man, from The Godfather to Saturday Night Fever With The Godfather recently re-released in a new print, Don Corleone and his family are back on our screens, shovelling spaghetti into their mouths, screaming at their wives and shooting other Mafia families – all with excessive amounts of blood, plum tomatoes, swagger, sharp suits and great style. I love them all – I cry at Michael’s wedding, smile wryly at the Don’s death, wince at Connie’s bleating and thrill at Sonny’s explosions of sex and violence. But I also hate all that macho posturing, those strangling patriarchal systems, the supplication of wives, mothers, daughters to men’s ‘business’. I want to pay these godfathers due respect, but I also want to look beyond their dapper costuming and ask why these representations are so cherished in our culture. In doing so, I want to suggest that the most interesting thing about Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando and their Latin brothers is the way in which their Italian-ness is defined through their sexuality. The phenomenon of ‘Italian-American’ as a sensibility and a particular set of narrative conventions has shifted over the years since The Godfather, but the core characteristics remain the same. Italian- Americans, according to screen law, are sexy, violent men struggling against the powers that be to protect their family honour. Their stories are full of the rituals of heterosexuality performed with glamour and passion (weddings, family feasts, straight sex). Their muscles flex to grapple with, and glory in, organised crime, the Catholic church and l’ordine della famiglia: a highly controlled and controlling hierarchical patriarchal family system. After Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was released in 1972, the screen image of Italian-American masculinity which it established became so popular that it entered the realms of social iconography, swiftly reinforced by the likes of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever. Don Corleone’s “I make you an offer you can’t refuse”, Travis Bickle’s “You talkin’ to me?”, car bumper stickers reading “Mafia Staff Car; Keepa Ya Hands Off” and endless parodies of John Travolta/Tony Manero doing that dance in that white suit – gestures which we think of as Italian-American have become part of our culture. BUY Francis Ford Coppola films online from and 244 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Italian-American men have stepped out of the screen and into everyday life and language. What it means in screen terms to be an Italian- American man can tell us much about what it means to be a white man. It is crucial that white male heterosexuality is made visible, is put under the critical microscope, in this way because it has always maintained its dominance by virtue of its invisibility. As Richard Dyer has argued in his essay ‘White’: whiteness, like heterosexuality, secures power by appearing not to be anything in particular. It is simply there, transparent, the given and ‘natural’ way to be. ‘Italian-American’ is one typification which whiteness has constructed of itself – a group of stereotypes which provide us with a starting point for understanding how whiteness sets itself up in a dominant position. In the 1970s, white American culture seemed to be in crisis. The Watergate fiasco, the war in Vietnam, the rise of black, gay and women’s liberation movements all meant that the hallowed American way lost its direction. Hollywood’s reaction was to look to ethnicity as a means of reinstating the white heterosexual males’ central position of power, returning him to his role as the Real Thing. We can admire and trust Don Corleone’s power because it does not appear to be compatible with WASP power. Italians were a way of getting back to basics through the depiction of a truly ‘American’ ethic of the struggle for survival in a land where nobodies can become somebodies – as in The Godfather, Rocky, and, rather differently, in Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon and Saturday Night Fever. In addition, Italian culture had the added attraction of l’ordine della famiglia to help (re)glorify patriarchy and put women back in their place: in the home, supporting their men from beneath. However, since the Italian American man’s ‘realness’ is so often represented as physicality – we know he’s authentic because we can see his sweating body – the reality of his heterosexuality is considerably destabilised. The power and danger of the ‘Italian’ body on screen are heavily eroticised qualities. Male WASP heroes of the 70s, like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, are invisible bodies who display little emotion, epitomising rigid stoicism and phallic control. In Dirty Harry (1971), Eastwood is always poker faced, never ruffled or sweating very much, his power coolly contained within his .44 Magnum pistol. The Italian man is often opposed to such straightness, flexing his muscles, getting all hot blooded and passionate, demonstrating his body as the signifier of his masculinity and ethnicity. The display of the male body as erotic object is a troublesome area: how do we make these bodies, which are supposed to be active, hard, non-malleable, into ‘passive’ objects of the cinema audience’s gaze – a role traditionally reserved for the female body? One way to do it is through sporting images – the excuse for looking at a man’s body being the admiration of BUY Francis Ford Coppola films online from and 245 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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